It’s no secret that perimenopause has become a hot topic over recent years; the word is plugged into search engines more than 200,000 times each month. It’s less common knowledge, though, that hormonal changes during the perimenopause stage can significantly affect cardiovascular risk.
Center Core Faculty member Sung Kyun Park, ScD, MPH, professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health Sciences, was named the 2026 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award acclaimed for his strong teaching and mentoring skills. Over the course of his fifteen year career as a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, he has developed and led impactful coursework, mentored students in and out of the classroom, and been committed to the continuous improvement of education across the school.
“What we see differently during midlife is that the pattern of physical functioning limitations is really quite dynamic. We see that over that midlife phase, people are as likely to decline in their physical functioning as they are to improve. And what this really suggests to us is that midlife is a really important life stage to think about improving health, because it is dynamic, it is malleable.”
“They’re a very, very invisible population,” said Alexis Handal, a University of Michigan professor who co-leads the Michigan Farmworker Project alongside researcher Lisbeth Iglesias-Ríos.
“Since there are limited treatment options for RSV, it's important to understand the potential long-term outcomes of severe RSV infection so that clinicians and public health workers can identify who might benefit from additional follow-up after their illness. This information can also help inform efforts to prevent disease or reduce severity, such as through vaccination, which is now available to certain groups of adults.”
“If you open an endocrinology textbook and look at what hormone patterns look like across the menopause transition, that is data from SWAN ... SWAN is by far the largest, longest, most in-depth study of women traversing the midlife and menopausal transition and then following them into late adulthood” — Carrie Karvonen-Gutierrez, PhD, MPH (Associate Chair for Faculty Affairs, Epidemiology and Director, Center for Lifecourse Epidemiology and Aging Research)
“Cardiovascular comorbidities such as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes may also cause hot flashes way before a woman’s transition begins. It is likely that underlying cardiovascular conditions may increase risk of hot flashes, and frequent, high intensity hot flashes experienced for a long duration may increase cardiovascular risk.”
The SWAN Multi-Pollutant Study (MPS) was initiated in 2016 to examine health effects of multiple environmental chemical exposures, including perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), metals, phenols, phthalates, and organophosphate pesticide among midlife women. Funded through two R01 grants by the National Institute of Environmental Health and Sciences (NIEHS), the SWAN MPS specifically investigates 1) obesity, type-2 diabetes and related metabolic endpoints; and 2) reproductive health including sex steroid hormones, age at menopause and ovarian aging).
SWAN Genomic Analyses performed dense genome-wide genotyping and imputation of genetic variants throughout the genome to the Haplotype Reference Consortium (HRC) reference panel in 1538 SWAN participants. This project enables SWAN to participate in genetic consortia focused on reproductive aging as well as risk factors for health and disease in women with data uploaded to dbGaP. We are also conducting gene-based analyses to assess the association of menopausal traits, including vasomotor symptoms, with genetic loci previously identified to be associated with age at menarche and menopause. (AG 017719)
Initiated in 2013, MiLES is a newly established cohort study which creates and maintains the MiLES Longitudinal Cohort & Biobank, including lupus cases from the southeast Michigan surveillance registry as well as population-based controls.